Monday 13th February 2017

After last week, I’m keen for this week to be a productive week. As a result, today was about getting a lot of shit that’s been hanging over me, done.
I got some household admin out the way (paying my credit card and sending a birthday card to a relative) before arranging plans for meeting one my best friends next week when he’s in the area. I’m looking forward to catching up. Even though I saw him at xmas, there’s a lot to catch up about.
I’ve also had a task hanging over me from last year to create synopsises and sample chapters from a lot of my novel length projects. Whilst this isn’t urgent as I’m as busy as hell with Black as Knight and its sequel, I want to have things ready to go in case opportunities arise. So I’d arranged with a couple of writer friends to have a look over them in their spare time.
Trouble is with so many projects, there’s always some document or other than needs going over so getting the stack of stuff ready seems like a never-ending task. In the end, I just emailed a couple of synopsises over and have decided to handle it piecemeal.
I was also all ready to type a chase email to an armourer regarding some replacement kit following a manufacturing failure. Except I checked and found that I had received it. That’s both good (I don’t need to chase it up as I have the kit), it’s also annoying as I could have used it in recent tournaments. Oh well
I’m currently working on a new scene in the novel with a returning character. The challenge with this scene is for it to be a recap without it being boring (The hero needs to fill the character in on everything that’s been going on). If I skip the dialogue the scene plays out too quick, but if I go over it all again, it can seem a bit dry. So I’ve decided this is a good place to do some fun interaction and maybe build out the character a little. She plays a bigger role later in the book so it makes sense to establish her a little now. That decided, the real trick now is… how am I going to do this?
Also had a quick discussion with my agent today. She gave me some advice on common traps with sequels. I’m going to be getting some editorial comments on Black as Knight in the near future. My plan is to give myself a week or two to let a plan take shape and then take 2 weeks off the day job to just get them done. I realised today that I’ve come to enjoy editing after the mountain that was last year. Editing the half-draft I had on Black As Knight’s sequel is actually a lot of fun.
Sometimes knowing it’s supposed to be hard makes the job easier.
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